On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 10:36 AM, Steve Davidson <jeep at scshome.net> wrote:
I forgot about the SNA product for Windows NT 3.51/4.0. I have a couple of those kits hanging around. I don't have the SNA hardware but I do have the software.
Any takers? I certainly don't need them?
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE on behalf of Jason Stevens
Sent: Wed 10/21/2009 10:33
To: hecnet at update.uu.se
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Next retro comms project?
Microsoft SNA server works pretty well for that, and it's easy to find...
Many moons ago I had TONNES of machines setup in that kind of manner, with
type 1 token ring to boot! (4mbit).
Even with Windows NT 3.51 & 4.0 it worked surprisingly well. (SNA Server 2.x
was waaay better then 3.x & 4.x IMHO). Anyways it was easy to connect the
tokenring to the FEP, but later on we got cisco routers that would do
translational bridging and local ack so we moved our SNA servers to
ethernet only.. Just remember to flip the bits of the FEP address as the
endian is different from ethernet to tokenring.
I've also done the netware SNA gateway, but it was living hell to setup... I
doubt I could get it to work again...
On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Fred <fcoffey at thrifty.misernet.net> wrote:
On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Sampsa Laine wrote:
I thought SNA mostly ran on Token Ring or something?
I have an IBM PS/2 model (something) with both an MCA Token Ring card and
and MCA Ethernet - and I even have a passive Token Ring Mau! (and a cable,
somewhere ...)
Now if I could just find that gateway software. When I had access to a
real mainframe, all of the PC's went through a handful of these PS/2's via
Ethernet, and the PS/2's had token ring cards in them connected to a real
FEP.
Fred
Hello!
Steve, you have your taker. So how do we arrange this process?
----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature was once found posting rude
messages in English in the Moscow subway."
Hi,
Sorry, I must have been asleep when suggesting : for a DECnet...
The # would be fine, I'll happily give my vote for that.
All my best,
G ran
Sampsa Laine wrote:
Ah yes, that old chestnut, scando-letters in 7 bit, had the same issues on BBSes back in the 80s/90s myself (I'm Finnish).
Ok, since the pipe symbol is in reality almost a letter, I suggest we go with #.
: might be used in the comments field to point to objects on HECNET (e.g. "..mail me at CHIMPY::SAMPSA") and people do use it and ; in writing quite frequently.
Shall we suggest to change the separator from | to # ?
Sampsa
On 22 Oct 2009, at 10:50, goran ahling wrote:
Hi,
just one humble little detail, thus a direct mail and not to the list... (Sorry I'm some days after in reading/commenting this storm of messages)
Once upon time, right about the time when those computers we are now "playing" with were new, there was US-ASCII, a 7 bit character encoding scheme, representing, amongst others, the 26 characters used in English writing. But in other countries, like here in Sweden, we use some other number of characters in our alpabet - swedish uses 29 letters, russian uses 33, for example.
So, a "local code" was develped, where some few of the rarely used tokens of the US-ASCII-scheme was instead used for those extra 6 letters (lower and upper case of 3 letters).
This was set in the ISO 646 standard, set 1975/12/01 - locally named SEN 85 02 00 Annex B
Here those letters are represented as:
0x7d }
0x7b {
0x7c |
0x5d ]
0x5b [
0x5c \
So, if I'm writing my given name (G ran) in that 7-bit coding, as we often do in those old systems, I'll write it G|ran. In an old system (might be old version RSX, might be RT-11 or migt be TOPS-10), I'd have to use that format.
These extra letters are quite common in daily writing and in names as they are wowels. I guess that the system descriptions you are trying to find a suitable format to encode most likely will contain names of owner/manager/..., end eventually also a city name as location. There are several citys inside Sweden containing these tokens (like \rebro, \regrund, \rkelljunga, G|teborg, Malm|, V}nersborg, Lax{, ...), not to mention several popular personal and family-names
Besides, there is an extra "tweak" to this.
If i write these letters in "DEC Multinational", almost identical (in this respect) to ISO-LATIN-1, but strip the 8:th bit (not uncommon, try a VT-100 terminal or equivalent "telnet" 7-bit "of the shelf"!), You would end up with getting edvEDV.
In those old dyas, the department secratary quite easilly managed to sort out post (from SUN microsystems) sent to mr. Gveran Eheling (my name is G ran hling), even though my dep. used DEC computers, that had working 8-bit...
So, to end up this E-mail:
Would possibly the : or the ; be a better separator than the | , as I really think these characters are more rarely used than the pipe!
An alternative might be the #
All my best,
G ran hling .EQ. G|ran ]hling .EQ. Goeran AAhling .NE. Goran Ahling
(Missconfigured printer might even print it as Gveran Ehling, but is it still NOT Goran Ahling, that would be another given name and another family name).
Sampsa Laine wrote:
Why? What would that accomplish that the pipe separated format doesn't except make things uglier? The reason I chose the pipe symbol is because this way we don't have to quote strings as people very seldomly use pipe symbols, but do use commas all the time...
On 21 Oct 2009, at 02:15, Steve Davidson wrote:
Let's try this again...
Any chance this could be in comma separated format? Put strings in
quotes if necessary.
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On
Behalf Of Sampsa Laine
Sent: Tuesday, October 20, 2009 19:43
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] HECnet crawler and INFO.TXT
I've updated CHIMPY in the same format.
Sampsa
On 21 Oct 2009, at 00:26, Bob Armstrong wrote:
I took Sampsa's suggestion and put an INFO.TXT on CODA with a
machine
readable section at the end that contains information about the
local nodes.
I already wrote a little DCL script that crawls the HECnet and
collects all
the INFO.TXT files that it can find (so far there are eight,
counting mine)
and if enough people adopt this format I'll write another little
script to
parse out the node information.
The format is pretty straight forward - you can just type out
CODA::INFO.TXT and see for yourself.
Bob
Brian Hechinger wrote:
On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 06:07:55PM +0200, Johnny Billquist wrote:
It's nice, isn't it? Get them all interested and then make THEM do the work. :)
Guilty as charged. The only thing that surprise me is that I have been playing with HECnet and trying to get more people connected for so long (I think I've soon been doing this for ten years), and recently the
Let's see, I joined in, uhm, let's see, that's right after I left eBay and
went to work at Mack Trucks, so that would have been 2000. It's been at
least 9 years since I got involved and I forget how long you were at it
before that. I know you had the serial over IP thinging already written
by that point.
Longer than I thought, or remembered then... Yikes!
number of connected places, and people, have started to accelerate. And now I start seeing activities for doing stuff around this whole thing by others as well.
Great fun.
This is exactly the whole point. It wasn't just about the small number of
us getting it going, it was about getting other people excited about it as
well.
Job well done. :)
Exactly. I'm very exited about seeing others starting to drive things forward.
Now I can crawl back to my retro RSX hacking full time... :-)
Seriously speking, I'm about to write a new MAIL11 client and server for RSX, just because there isn't any that is good enough right now. And I also want to make it possible for me to later extend it to also talk SMTP once my TCP/IP is ready... :-)
After that, I'll create a relaying under RSX just because I will be able to. He he...
Johnny
On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 06:07:55PM +0200, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Except I think we're at Gbit ethernet locally to Uppsala University, and
I think it's redundant 10 Gb to the rest of SUNet. And from SUNet I'm
not sure what speeds we have over the atlantic and down to the rest of
europe, but it's probably acceptable. :-) (Yes, we're spoiled.)
Showoff. :)
It's nice, isn't it? Get them all interested and then make THEM do the
work. :)
Guilty as charged. The only thing that surprise me is that I have been
playing with HECnet and trying to get more people connected for so long
(I think I've soon been doing this for ten years), and recently the
Let's see, I joined in, uhm, let's see, that's right after I left eBay and
went to work at Mack Trucks, so that would have been 2000. It's been at
least 9 years since I got involved and I forget how long you were at it
before that. I know you had the serial over IP thinging already written
by that point.
number of connected places, and people, have started to accelerate. And
now I start seeing activities for doing stuff around this whole thing by
others as well.
Great fun.
This is exactly the whole point. It wasn't just about the small number of
us getting it going, it was about getting other people excited about it as
well.
Job well done. :)
-brian
--
"Coding in C is like sending a 3 year old to do groceries. You gotta
tell them exactly what you want or you'll end up with a cupboard full of
pop tarts and pancake mix." -- IRC User (http://www.bash.org/?841435)
Ah yes, that old chestnut, scando-letters in 7 bit, had the same issues on BBSes back in the 80s/90s myself (I'm Finnish).
Ok, since the pipe symbol is in reality almost a letter, I suggest we go with #.
: might be used in the comments field to point to objects on HECNET (e.g. "..mail me at CHIMPY::SAMPSA") and people do use it and ; in writing quite frequently.
Shall we suggest to change the separator from | to # ?
Sampsa
On 22 Oct 2009, at 10:50, goran ahling wrote:
Hi,
just one humble little detail, thus a direct mail and not to the list... (Sorry I'm some days after in reading/commenting this storm of messages)
Once upon time, right about the time when those computers we are now "playing" with were new, there was US-ASCII, a 7 bit character encoding scheme, representing, amongst others, the 26 characters used in English writing. But in other countries, like here in Sweden, we use some other number of characters in our alpabet - swedish uses 29 letters, russian uses 33, for example.
So, a "local code" was develped, where some few of the rarely used tokens of the US-ASCII-scheme was instead used for those extra 6 letters (lower and upper case of 3 letters).
This was set in the ISO 646 standard, set 1975/12/01 - locally named SEN 85 02 00 Annex B
Here those letters are represented as:
0x7d }
0x7b {
0x7c |
0x5d ]
0x5b [
0x5c \
So, if I'm writing my given name (G ran) in that 7-bit coding, as we often do in those old systems, I'll write it G|ran. In an old system (might be old version RSX, might be RT-11 or migt be TOPS-10), I'd have to use that format.
These extra letters are quite common in daily writing and in names as they are wowels. I guess that the system descriptions you are trying to find a suitable format to encode most likely will contain names of owner/manager/..., end eventually also a city name as location. There are several citys inside Sweden containing these tokens (like \rebro, \regrund, \rkelljunga, G|teborg, Malm|, V}nersborg, Lax{, ...), not to mention several popular personal and family-names
Besides, there is an extra "tweak" to this.
If i write these letters in "DEC Multinational", almost identical (in this respect) to ISO-LATIN-1, but strip the 8:th bit (not uncommon, try a VT-100 terminal or equivalent "telnet" 7-bit "of the shelf"!), You would end up with getting edvEDV.
In those old dyas, the department secratary quite easilly managed to sort out post (from SUN microsystems) sent to mr. Gveran Eheling (my name is G ran hling), even though my dep. used DEC computers, that had working 8-bit...
So, to end up this E-mail:
Would possibly the : or the ; be a better separator than the | , as I really think these characters are more rarely used than the pipe!
An alternative might be the #
All my best,
G ran hling .EQ. G|ran ]hling .EQ. Goeran AAhling .NE. Goran Ahling
(Missconfigured printer might even print it as Gveran Ehling, but is it still NOT Goran Ahling, that would be another given name and another family name).
Sampsa Laine wrote:
Why? What would that accomplish that the pipe separated format doesn't except make things uglier? The reason I chose the pipe symbol is because this way we don't have to quote strings as people very seldomly use pipe symbols, but do use commas all the time...
On 21 Oct 2009, at 02:15, Steve Davidson wrote:
Let's try this again...
Any chance this could be in comma separated format? Put strings in
quotes if necessary.
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On
Behalf Of Sampsa Laine
Sent: Tuesday, October 20, 2009 19:43
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] HECnet crawler and INFO.TXT
I've updated CHIMPY in the same format.
Sampsa
On 21 Oct 2009, at 00:26, Bob Armstrong wrote:
I took Sampsa's suggestion and put an INFO.TXT on CODA with a
machine
readable section at the end that contains information about the
local nodes.
I already wrote a little DCL script that crawls the HECnet and
collects all
the INFO.TXT files that it can find (so far there are eight,
counting mine)
and if enough people adopt this format I'll write another little
script to
parse out the node information.
The format is pretty straight forward - you can just type out
CODA::INFO.TXT and see for yourself.
Bob
Hi.
Brian Hechinger wrote:
On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 05:41:14PM +0200, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Speaking of which, Update runs its own DNS servers, web servers, and just about anything else as well. And we don't have any bandwidth limitations, and we have a pretty high bandwidth in general (maybe more than most places).
I just don't personally care much about fixing web pages. While I certainly can manage DNS records, I'm so old school that I keep them in static files for bind to use. And I haven't checked what Update is running now, so I don't know how much of that I could do. But there are a few other Updaters around here as well, who might chime in.
I'm in a similar situation. My colo box is MY hardware (sorry, it runs
Solaris, not VMS) and I have no restrictions on the bandwidth other than
"don't be an ass". 100Mbit. The current server is a POS but the there
has been a replacement server delivered that should be going in at some
point. I can host web content, but I, like you, don't care to be mucking
about with web pages (although I will if needed to).
I'm not opposed to dynamic DNS and/or DB backed DNS (which i might be setting
up soon anyway) if people want to be able to manage their own DNS for any
domains that I might host. I can also be a slave to any domains for anyone
who needs.
He he. About the same as here then.
Except I think we're at Gbit ethernet locally to Uppsala University, and I think it's redundant 10 Gb to the rest of SUNet. And from SUNet I'm not sure what speeds we have over the atlantic and down to the rest of europe, but it's probably acceptable. :-) (Yes, we're spoiled.)
But on the other hand, I don't mind other people taking initiatives, and making stuff happen either.
It's nice, isn't it? Get them all interested and then make THEM do the work. :)
Guilty as charged. The only thing that surprise me is that I have been playing with HECnet and trying to get more people connected for so long (I think I've soon been doing this for ten years), and recently the number of connected places, and people, have started to accelerate. And now I start seeing activities for doing stuff around this whole thing by others as well.
Great fun.
Johnny
On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 05:41:14PM +0200, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Speaking of which, Update runs its own DNS servers, web servers, and
just about anything else as well. And we don't have any bandwidth
limitations, and we have a pretty high bandwidth in general (maybe more
than most places).
I just don't personally care much about fixing web pages. While I
certainly can manage DNS records, I'm so old school that I keep them in
static files for bind to use. And I haven't checked what Update is
running now, so I don't know how much of that I could do. But there are
a few other Updaters around here as well, who might chime in.
I'm in a similar situation. My colo box is MY hardware (sorry, it runs
Solaris, not VMS) and I have no restrictions on the bandwidth other than
"don't be an ass". 100Mbit. The current server is a POS but the there
has been a replacement server delivered that should be going in at some
point. I can host web content, but I, like you, don't care to be mucking
about with web pages (although I will if needed to).
I'm not opposed to dynamic DNS and/or DB backed DNS (which i might be setting
up soon anyway) if people want to be able to manage their own DNS for any
domains that I might host. I can also be a slave to any domains for anyone
who needs.
But on the other hand, I don't mind other people taking initiatives, and
making stuff happen either.
It's nice, isn't it? Get them all interested and then make THEM do the work. :)
Just giving you all some more options. :-)
+1
-brian
--
"Coding in C is like sending a 3 year old to do groceries. You gotta
tell them exactly what you want or you'll end up with a cupboard full of
pop tarts and pancake mix." -- IRC User (http://www.bash.org/?841435)
Speaking of which, Update runs its own DNS servers, web servers, and just about anything else as well. And we don't have any bandwidth limitations, and we have a pretty high bandwidth in general (maybe more than most places).
I just don't personally care much about fixing web pages. While I certainly can manage DNS records, I'm so old school that I keep them in static files for bind to use. And I haven't checked what Update is running now, so I don't know how much of that I could do. But there are a few other Updaters around here as well, who might chime in.
But on the other hand, I don't mind other people taking initiatives, and making stuff happen either.
Just giving you all some more options. :-)
Johnny
Steve Davidson wrote:
If we really get stuck with this I am my own ISP and can probably make
something work. I pay for a certain amount of bandwidth, but the
addresses (all static) are mine to assign and manage. I have no
practical limitations to the number of domains they represent.
Current domains pointing to my address space (that may be of use in this
context) are:
69.21.253.228
decvax.net - alias for vmsnet.org (at the moment anyway)
vmsnet.org - currently a NetBSD front-end system to a VAX cluster. Soon
it will be a VMS cluster of Alpha's and VAXen
69.21.253.229
pdp-11.net - currently a NetBSD front-end system to a PDP-11 group of
systems (don't ask it's ugly to say the least)
69.21.253.230
declab.net - intended to point to the SMDnet backbone (when I have more
time to deal with this)
declab.org - intended to point to the HECnet backbone (when I have more
time to deal with this)
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On
Behalf Of Bob Armstrong
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 10:50
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: [HECnet] hecnet.eu and decnet.org domains
Sampsa Laine wrote:
Suggestion: If we include external IP addresses for any nodes that have them in those data files we discussed yesterday, could we populate the DNS with these (i.e. chimpy.hecnet.eu points at CHIMPY's external IP address)?
Looks like Mark has run into a few snags with his registrar for the
hecnet.eu domain, but nothing fatal and it should get straightened out
in a
few days. In the meantime I noticed that the decnet.org domain was also
available - seemed like a shame to just leave it lying around for anyone
to
get, so I registered that one. I don't know if I'll actually end up
doing
anything with it or if I'll just give it up in a year, but in the
meantime
it's available for any good use we can think of.
If your machine is directly connected to the Internet and you want a
third
level DNS record for "node.decnet.org", send me an email with the name
and
IP and/or FQDN and I'll add an A or CNAME record as you like. AFAIK my
ISP
doesn't have any official limit on the number of DNS records that
they'll
permit per domain, so we can test that policy :-)
It'd be nice if all the various documents and status displays
associated
with HECnet were all accessible from a single web page, but I have
absolutely zero desire to be a webmaster. If somebody wants to
volunteer to
host a web page for HECnet let me know and I'll be happy to point the
www.decnet.org entry that way. You don't have to actually host all the
various documents and scripts, of course - just maintain a page with
links
to them.
Bob
If we really get stuck with this I am my own ISP and can probably make
something work. I pay for a certain amount of bandwidth, but the
addresses (all static) are mine to assign and manage. I have no
practical limitations to the number of domains they represent.
Current domains pointing to my address space (that may be of use in this
context) are:
69.21.253.228
decvax.net - alias for vmsnet.org (at the moment anyway)
vmsnet.org - currently a NetBSD front-end system to a VAX cluster. Soon
it will be a VMS cluster of Alpha's and VAXen
69.21.253.229
pdp-11.net - currently a NetBSD front-end system to a PDP-11 group of
systems (don't ask it's ugly to say the least)
69.21.253.230
declab.net - intended to point to the SMDnet backbone (when I have more
time to deal with this)
declab.org - intended to point to the HECnet backbone (when I have more
time to deal with this)
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On
Behalf Of Bob Armstrong
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 10:50
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: [HECnet] hecnet.eu and decnet.org domains
Sampsa Laine wrote:
Suggestion: If we include external IP addresses for any nodes that
have them in those data files we discussed yesterday, could we
populate the DNS with these (i.e. chimpy.hecnet.eu points at CHIMPY's
external IP address)?
Looks like Mark has run into a few snags with his registrar for the
hecnet.eu domain, but nothing fatal and it should get straightened out
in a
few days. In the meantime I noticed that the decnet.org domain was also
available - seemed like a shame to just leave it lying around for anyone
to
get, so I registered that one. I don't know if I'll actually end up
doing
anything with it or if I'll just give it up in a year, but in the
meantime
it's available for any good use we can think of.
If your machine is directly connected to the Internet and you want a
third
level DNS record for "node.decnet.org", send me an email with the name
and
IP and/or FQDN and I'll add an A or CNAME record as you like. AFAIK my
ISP
doesn't have any official limit on the number of DNS records that
they'll
permit per domain, so we can test that policy :-)
It'd be nice if all the various documents and status displays
associated
with HECnet were all accessible from a single web page, but I have
absolutely zero desire to be a webmaster. If somebody wants to
volunteer to
host a web page for HECnet let me know and I'll be happy to point the
www.decnet.org entry that way. You don't have to actually host all the
various documents and scripts, of course - just maintain a page with
links
to them.
Bob
Sampsa Laine wrote:
Suggestion: If we include external IP addresses for any nodes that
have them in those data files we discussed yesterday, could we
populate the DNS with these (i.e. chimpy.hecnet.eu points at CHIMPY's
external IP address)?
Looks like Mark has run into a few snags with his registrar for the
hecnet.eu domain, but nothing fatal and it should get straightened out in a
few days. In the meantime I noticed that the decnet.org domain was also
available - seemed like a shame to just leave it lying around for anyone to
get, so I registered that one. I don't know if I'll actually end up doing
anything with it or if I'll just give it up in a year, but in the meantime
it's available for any good use we can think of.
If your machine is directly connected to the Internet and you want a third
level DNS record for "node.decnet.org", send me an email with the name and
IP and/or FQDN and I'll add an A or CNAME record as you like. AFAIK my ISP
doesn't have any official limit on the number of DNS records that they'll
permit per domain, so we can test that policy :-)
It'd be nice if all the various documents and status displays associated
with HECnet were all accessible from a single web page, but I have
absolutely zero desire to be a webmaster. If somebody wants to volunteer to
host a web page for HECnet let me know and I'll be happy to point the
www.decnet.org entry that way. You don't have to actually host all the
various documents and scripts, of course - just maintain a page with links
to them.
Bob
